Innovation Management

Books and Analyst Reports

Measuring Innovation 2009
The Need for Action

The Boston Consulting Group
BCG Report – A BCG Senior Management Survey


From the Executive Summary:
Good decision making hinges on good information. That rule applies to all aspects of business, particularly innovation. Yet companies routinely do a poor job of measuring their innovation efforts—and, as a result, often make decisions more on the basis of guesswork than of hard data. This comes at a potentially sizable cost, especially in the current econommic climate, in which the need to account for every dollar and maximize the return on every investment is magnified

Our latest survey on innovation metrics and measurement reveals that, on balance, companies continue to struggle with measurement—knowing what to measure, collecting the data, and using the data to make decisions. Yet there are also some encouraging signs. We discuss the good and the bad in this report, and we also offer thoughts on how companies can improve their measurement practices and, in the process, improve the return on their innovation spending. read more »

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks

by C.K. Prahalad (Author), M.S. Krishnan (Author) From the Back Cover: "Prahalad and Krishnan argue that to create value in a flattening world, companies must develop highly flexible innovation strategies that 'fold the future in.'

To do this, they must partner with truly global networks of partners and customers—and rethink everything from their core capabilities to their corporate culture.

Prahalad's and Krishnan's book is a compelling roadmap for this next phase of globalization." – Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft.

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The next step in open innovation

The McKinsey Quarterly
The creation of knowledge, products, and services by online communities of companies and consumers is still in its earliest stages. Who knows where it will lead?
Summary:
The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process...

Excerpt
For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls—from suppliers, independent inventors, and university labs.

Executives in a number of companies are now considering the next step in this trend toward more open innovation.1 For one thing, they are looking at ways to delegate more of the management of innovation to networks of suppliers and independent specialists that interact with each other to cocreate products and services. They also hope to get their customers into the act.

If a company could use technology to link these outsiders into its development projects, could it come up with better ideas for new products and develop those ideas more quickly and cheaply than it can today? Suppose that a wireless carrier, say, were to orchestrate the design of a new generation of mobile devices through an open network of interested customers, software engineers, and component suppliers, all working interactively with one another.

This is the model of innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties....

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2008: Innovation Management Services Take Off

by Navi Radjou with Thomas Mendel, Ph.D., Forrester
IT Consultants Armed With New Skills Can Boost Clients' Innovation Performance.

This is the first document in the "Driving Customer Co-Innovation In Global IT Ecosystems" series...

Document Excerpt:
As the global economy softens in 2008, CEOs will strive to sustain their firms' competitiveness by innovating around their products, services, processes, and business models. To systematically drive such multifaceted innovation, CEOs need to revamp their firms' market-blind and insular R&D and go-to-market operations into globally networked, user-focused processes. Sensing an opportunity, strategy consultants like Booz Allen Hamilton and McKinsey & Company are gearing up to provide "innovation management services" to growth-seeking C-level execs. IT providers like Capgemini, IBM, and Wipro are equally well positioned to help their clients re-engineer their innovation processes — but, to win in this nascent market, they must first upgrade their soft skills and learn to infuse client intimacy into their engagement models. read more »